


because these memories of you (live like ghosts in this room)

by KawaiiKitsuneGirl



Category: The Originals (TV), The Vampire Diaries & Related Fandoms, The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Angst, Brothers, Family, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, JUST, Tears, Whump, im so obsessed with this, klaus looking after elijah, like chill its not bad, lots of them tbh, mild amounts of blood, not incest guys sorry, why am i apologising
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-16
Updated: 2018-03-16
Packaged: 2019-04-01 07:41:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13993665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KawaiiKitsuneGirl/pseuds/KawaiiKitsuneGirl
Summary: Her new skin and dark eyes wink up at him flirtatiously even as an evil smile flits across her features and morphs them away from familiarity and yet too close to his Celeste for him to truly be at ease. She grins easily, as always, and he knows he still loves her and he knows that his actions will only destroy himself but better him than his family. She takes a step back and he follows and he’s stuck and trapped and can’t escape-She laughs purely and it pains him that such a sound can still come from her throat; he wishes she’d changed away from the woman she once was but he can see every moment they spent together still trapped behind these new eyes.





	because these memories of you (live like ghosts in this room)

**Author's Note:**

> There's really not enough Elijah whumpage in this fandom, so take some of mine. Season 1, episode 13 ish
> 
> Kind of a drabble, and also very self-serving (basically way over the top) but hope people enjoy

Her new skin and dark eyes wink up at him flirtatiously even as an evil smile flits across her features and morphs them away from familiarity and yet too close to his Celeste for him to truly be at ease. She grins easily, as always, and he knows he still loves her and he knows that his actions will only destroy himself but better him than his family. She takes a step back and he follows and he’s stuck and trapped and can’t escape-

She laughs purely and it pains him that such a sound can still come from her throat; he wishes she’d changed away from the woman she once was but he can see every moment they spent together still trapped behind these new eyes. 

Glass slices her throat and he looks down on her now. Her body (‘Sabrina’ the naïve witches called her) lies crumpled on the ground, blood pooling near his feet but not close enough for him. The iron tang drifts towards him on the gentle breeze, and his nostrils flare ever so slightly with the temptation (he hasn’t fed in so long) but he’s a master of control and he’s not giving that up now. Not even for Celeste.

Her old body becomes flesh again. She realises she’s trapped. They both know there’s only one way this can end.

He kills her quickly (a small mercy for the love that gave him so much happiness and so much heartbreak) and then leaves her there without blessings or the freedom to leave the cemetery because he has so much more to deal with than a dead body.

Elijah loses his dagger to Klaus; Elijah is stabbed by Klaus; Elijah is condemned to unbearable agony and although Klaus never tells him what that agony was when that dagger was in his body, Elijah knows what he sees.

He sees all the days he cannot have. He’s immortal and knows pain all too well, so the dagger doesn’t bother with physical torture and no fiction hurts as much as the truth.

Elijah sees the days when he was happy, he sees the family he once had, standing together before their lives truly started. He sees Klaus, happy as a child and the dagger brings out his deepest desires where Klaus and Rebekah are by his side eternally, ruling the city as one and both of them are truly and honestly happy.

He sees Haylee. She glows, brighter than any flame, and she has a baby girl who is happy and innocent and draws in the light like a creature of magic, and he guesses she is. Haylee is happy in his vision and Elijah knows she could never be happy with him.

He sees Celeste, too, as if her memory will ever leave him. She dances, singing and laughing with her classic French accent but as lovely as the day she left him and none of this ever happened (he wishes oh so often that he had been brave enough to turn her earlier before Klaus caught wind of anything and the cruel dagger knows it and twists in the pain with a glimpse of sharp, vampire teeth that lets him know that this Celeste is not immortal, but as close to it as is possible for other creatures).

Klaus releases Elijah, sudden, unexpected, and he pretends nothing happens. 

All is well.

It’s only later, when the others are gone from his side and they are all freed from the graveyard, that he thinks about what happened that night. The door to his room is closed and as soundproofed as he knows how to do, and the look of fear of Celeste’s face as he sees her one last time before he kills her…it tears his heart in two. 

It won’t leave him alone. It stabs him and stabs him and he remembers how her French accent lingered in her true body and that voice of his love came back to haunt him once more and he shudders, alone in the big room where he once found comfort.

“Celeste,” he mutters under his breath, the word shaky and broken in a way Elijah is not and cannot be. 

Only, that was the love of his life that he stabbed killed massacred and how can he leave unaffected? He screws his eyes shut tight, grabbing his short hair in both hands and tugging it until it might fall out and he only stops because he knows too well that that he could continue.

Elijah tears off the jacket, throwing it at the wall with a fraction of his strength, and allowing the tie to follow it. It falls quietly to the ground. He is a practical man after all, and he will need to wear those again someday.

He tries to do the same with his shirt, focusing on each menial button, but his stupid fingers don’t stop shaking long enough for the delicate task and so it too is ripped off and the buttons fly everywhere. They tinkle down and he shoves off his trousers without any of his usual grace.

Elijah just doesn’t care anymore.

His clothes fall blindly down, heaps of litter in an otherwise perfectly ordered room, and he scrabbles blindly in his bedside for the picture he knows is there. It’s an artist’s rendition of Celeste; full of life and beauty and smiles and-

He breaks. A tear falls from his dark eye, first one and then the other, and they won’t stop falling, no matter how he tries. His breath too, it shakes and emerges in rasping hiccups that don’t help anyone, least of all himself, but he can’t stop feeling lost and alone.

He killed her.

“I killed her,” he gasps to himself, letting his body go and it collapses onto the bed in a pile of broken limbs and curses. Elijah hates feeling, especially when the feelings are as strong as this, and he can’t help but remember her death the first time when it was Klaus and not him in the wrong.

He screamed then, that one time, screamed for the loss of her. He doesn’t know if he has the effort left in him to scream anymore because his throat hurts already and his mind is full of soft cotton wool that dampens everything.

It’s easier, this. He doesn’t want to have to try, but his memory is too good and ‘please, Elijah, please’ she backs away from him in terror and it’s still his fault 

“Make it go away,” he sobs, burying his face into his arms and hoping that nobody hears. Elijah stumbles upright and throws off the light switch, burying himself back into the soft bed and hoping that life would go away and leave him alone.

He truly wanted nothing more than death, but that was an impossibility for a being like him. They really were cursed; Rebekah had always been the smarter one and here he was realising the truth of her words now.

It really was a cruel world.

Elijah cries more at the thought of having to go through another century (two, three, an eternity) like this because he wasn’t even done with his mourning after the first three centuries, never mind that this time he was the one who had raised the dagger and slaughtered the witch.

There were very few things in life that he hated: their father was normally the only thing on there. Klaus had made his way onto it with his massacre of the witches, and Elijah had never hated his brother more than in the moment he stumbled back into the room to find Celeste, her skin still warm and soaked in sunlight, but her eyes closed dead to the world.

Klaus had killed her then, and it had taken all his self-control for the next century not to kill Klaus. Now he was the one who had killed her, and there was nothing holding him back but-

Elijah pauses in his misery to remember the white dagger that Klaus was to kill them with earlier. It had not been destroyed, and it was capable of killing an Original, and maybe if he-

He growls at his traitorous mind, and bites into his arm as hard as he could to stop the thoughts from going anywhere. The flesh spurted, blood dripping all over his bed as his teeth gouged out chunks of his own skin and Elijah knows it wasn’t enough to pay for his sin. He bites down again and again and again and still nothing stops, his mind races too fast to keep up and all the while the tears refuse to cease their streaming and it was only when a hand touches his shoulder lightly that he freezes in place.

“Elijah?” an unexpectedly quiet voice says from behind him.

________________________________________

Klaus had retired to his room as soon as they had arrived home, nursing his wounds and ignoring Rebekah for a little bit longer. Elijah had gone into his room as well, though stoic as ever despite the events of the past day and night, but the younger vampire had noticed the quiet noise of something hitting their old floors a short time ago.

Klaus didn’t pay it any attention. It was likely just an accident (although even as he thought it, he knew something was wrong with that because Elijah was the careful sibling that didn’t drop things or shatter things- no, that was him and Elijah was the one who fixed it). There was another faint sound that followed it though, and then a third and maybe a fourth but by then Klaus is sure that his mind is playing tricks on him.

He paces the room anyway, angry at his failure to kill his traitorous sister and still sad at her betrayal in the first place. The anger left him in that graveyard, so Klaus is filled with an empty sadness that aches all the more for its unexpectedness. 

It’s when he’s next to the wall that separates him an Elijah that he hears it. A dull rasp, like a hiccup or a sob, and suddenly he’s frozen in place.

He’s next to Elijah’s room, he’s sure, and yet it must be Rebekah who is in there because if there’s anything the three of them know is that Elijah has their backs and he is strong enough to carry them all because there’s no time for him to break, and that’s the way it’s always been. He saves them, not the other way around and yet…

Klaus listens carefully and catches the next breath as it rips through the silent air, and it sounds like Elijah.

There’s another noise, sharp and unexpected, and it’s a growl that must tear its vicious way out of Elijah’s sophisticated throat, but then there’s the sound of flesh tearing and a chill runs down his spine as he wonders suddenly whether his older brother has somehow brought a meal into the house and is killing it, right next door.

He’s relieved that it’s not the pain of Elijah that he has to face, but all the same Klaus is angry because Elijah set the rules; no killing, and he’s the one breaking them.

Klaus uses his speed to arrive in the next room quickly. There’s only Elijah in there.

The problem is that it’s a version of Elijah that he doesn’t know how to deal with- this Elijah lies on a bed where blood soaks the mattress and he doesn’t wear clothing (the clothing is scattered throughout the room and that was the noises that tipped Klaus off in the first place) and this Elijah is so very broken that it hurts to look at him.

Skin rips again, and it dawns on him with horror that it’s Elijah’s own arm that the vampire teeth dig into so easily and Klaus is sickened and terrified by the action. He moves without thinking, following some kind of instinct that he was sure had left a long time ago, but maybe had stayed for longer than they’d both thought after all.

“Elijah?” he asks softly, putting a hand onto Elijah’s trembling shoulder and his older brother ceases all movement. Klaus internally panics, eyes flitting over the scene in hope of something or someone to guide him further, but he finds nothing, so he falls back on his usual technique of mockery because maybe that would bring Elijah back to normal.

“Is this my brave, noble brother?” he asks quietly, trying and failing to put his usual edge of derision into his voice, but the other man doesn’t seem to notice the lack of emotion filling it, and suddenly the shoulder shakes under his hand again.

“No, I’m sorry, wait, I didn’t mean to-“ Klaus babbles, eyes wide in horror as he realises he’s made Elijah cry more, not less.

“Just leave,” Elijah whispers quietly, and he can hear the raw edge in the elder’s voice, one that creaks and groans and Klaus wants desperately to leave, but he can’t. Family and all that.

“No…there’s clearly something wrong. Let me go kill it,” he offers instead, giving up on rectifying his mistake and settling for permission to stay (and maybe kill something. That would be easier than this).

“I already did,” Elijah mutters, voice full to the brim with hatred. It’s a bizarre mix of self-hatred and hatred directed at the world and maybe a little at Klaus, but he’s committed now so he doesn’t move.

“What?” he asks insensitively and knows it is, wincing a little at the harshness of it but hoping that Elijah will ignore that because Klaus is definitely the definition of socially inept and doesn’t mean half the things he says.

“…it doesn’t matter,” there’s still a faint tremor running through the shoulder though. There’s also a sluggish pump of blood spilling onto the bed from what appears to be multiple gouges in Elijah’s arm, and Klaus screws up his nose in distaste. 

“Let me heal that,” he tells Elijah instead of pressing, for now, and Klaus tears the skin of his own wrist to drip to Elijah’s mouth and fix all the wounds, but the other shakes his head without turning around.

“Seriously,” Klaus frowns, noticing the lack of movement, and he himself flashes around to the other side of Elijah and counts on the older vampire not following his natural instincts. He forces the man to look up.

Klaus struggles to keep his face straight at the sight; there’s blood leaking around his mouth like when they hunted for their food, but there’s also tears smudged lifelessly down the elegant face and dark, dull eyes that are on the verge of glaring at him, but can’t quite seem to drudge up enough emotion to do so.

Elijah laughs lowly, hollowly, at his reaction, and bats him away with a slow hand. “You don’t care. Leave,” he orders Klaus, but the latter’s done with demands now.

“No. Take my blood. Heal. Stop this weak nonsense,” the younger vampire insists, but he immediately knows he’s made a mistake when the corners of Elijah’s mouth turn down with a tremble that sets his guard up, and the dark eyes don’t bother looking at him anymore; they screw up tightly and a tear still drips down from one anyway.

“…I’m sorry…” he backpedals, horrified, and slowly sits on the bed next to Elijah. He sighs. They sit in silence for a moment, and the only noise is the ragged breathing that his brother can’t seem to stop for some reason, and when Klaus looks up, there are still tears sliding down his alabaster cheeks. It reminds him too much of the nights he spent when he was young, crying alone in the dark because father (no, Mikael) would never love him, and he throws his plans aside for now.

“’Lijah,” he whispers quietly, and hesitantly reaches out to pull his older brother towards him, and Elijah flops like a broken doll onto his chest. “It’ll be okay,” Klaus tries awkwardly, stiff and unyielding, but Elijah takes the reassurance for what it is and Klaus feels the uncomfortable sensation of wet tears soaking through his shirt as his brother shakes in his arms for what feels like an eternity.

He pulls him in tighter, not daring enough to stroke his hair or pat his back, but Klaus is confident enough with hugging that the pair sit there for many minutes and don’t say a word.

Eventually, Elijah stops moving. Even his breathing stops, not a concern for a vampire, and it lets Klaus know that Elijah is really, truly comfortable and likely asleep as well. He takes the opportunity to bite into his wrist again and drip the red liquid into the other’s mouth, waiting uncharacteristically patiently for the mangled arm to heal, then he picks up the limp body and carries it carefully into his own room.

They are just crossing the short landing that separates them (typical overprotective Elijah not moving further than a room away) when they run into Rebekah, emerging from her room and seemingly on her way out.

“What have you done to Elijah now?” she gasps in horror, her eyes trained on the bloodstains that coat Elijah and, to a small extent, Klaus, and the latter scowls at her in warning because they cannot wake him.

“I’ve done nothing, stupid sister. Elijah did this,” he whispers as angrily as he can in rebuttal to the accusation.

“Elijah!? Then why is he daggered in your arms?” she hisses back, and he rolls his eyes.

“He’s asleep, not daggered,” Klaus tells her, and sweeps the two of them away before she looks too closely and sees what was really happening. She watches them as they leave, and he thinks she might already know, but she leaves them to it and he’s just thankful for that.

________________________________________

It’s an hour or so before Elijah wakes up. He takes a minute to recall the events that wound up to his current situation, and he is morbidly embarrassed that Klaus saw him in his moment of weakness, and even more so that the younger vampire actually comforted him too.

“Finally awake, ‘Lijah?” Klaus asks him quietly, unexpectedly close to him, and Elijah notices immediately that the other is using the childhood nickname he used to use Before. It makes him smile, and his throat burns with the realisation that Klaus views at least the two of them as family again.

“Sorry,” he apologises to his younger brother quietly, not letting on how a simple nickname affected him.

“I would hope so. Now that you are normal again, I’d also like an explanation please,” Klaus commands, back to his usual manner, but Elijah is particularly fragile still and though he knows that ‘normal’ wasn’t meant as an insult to his earlier behaviour, he has to roll his eyes at the sensation of liquid scorching them once again. He doesn’t mean to cry so much, but his body isn’t obeying his commands at the moment.

“…explanation, right,” he mutters, blinking rapidly until the threat of tears has left him again, and he knows he has to explain his behaviour.

The only problem is that he can’t.

Every time he tries, the words get stuck in his throat and he’s only frustrated that he can’t be rational about this, but with frustration comes back the awful tears.

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to-“ Elijah apologises swiftly, using his fingers to swipe them away, but by then he’s remembered that he was crying because Celeste is gone again and by his own doing and they just keep overflowing.

“’Lijah.” Klaus says firmly, grabbing his chin with calloused fingertips and forcing Elijah to stop wiping and just look back. There’s a kind of panic lodged in the back of the dark eyes, one that Elijah knows he’s caused, along with some kind of fear and concern.

“Sorry, I’m sorry, just-“ he scoffs at his own mind, pulling back and dashing away the latest set, and not daring to meet Klaus’ eyes again yet.

“Just what?” Klaus asks and Elijah sighs, choking on a sob.

“I killed Celeste,” he whispers finally, but all that happens is Klaus drags him back against one another until Elijah is crying onto his shoulder, the two of them on equal levels and equal terms.

“I- She- She trapped us in the graveyard, so I-“ he begins. “I trapped her back in her first body- we found the- the bones and- I killed her. Klaus, I killed her in that first- she was French, she had a French accent- it was her voice- it was her-“

“Elijah,” Klaus says firmly and cuts off his babbling, and he’s rather thankful for that, seeing as his coherency levels were decreasing rather than improving.

“Call me ‘Lijah,” he begs softly, barely audible from where he’s buried his head deep into Klaus’ shoulder and the damp top he now wears. Whatever Klaus will say to this admission of weakness will be more bearable if Elijah can just remember that this is his little brother.

“…’Lijah’,” Klaus whispers in his ear and Elijah buries his head further. “She’d changed. That wasn’t your Celeste anymore,”

“When you stabbed me,” Elijah changes the topic abruptly, and can all but feel Klaus’ eyebrow raise sharply at it, but Elijah has a point to make here. “The unbearable agony of that dagger…I saw her, happy. Rebekah too…and you,” he confesses shyly, not daring to voice that ‘without me’ that lingers in his mind, because there’s no need to reveal it all.

He thinks Klaus hears it anyway.

Elijah knows that there’s something wrong with him, with all of them, they all know that. He also knows that the thing that’s specifically broken in himself is that he will please everyone else before himself, and so the most unbearable future and yet a probable one is that everyone around him will be able to be happy and they won’t need him and Elijah knows he would not survive that, not in any meaningful way.

“…forever and always, ‘lijah,” Klaus mutters back, deciding to leave the dagger in the past, as though he knows what Elijah is really thinking (and Klaus could be telepathic for all he knew. It would be just like the vampire not to share that with anyone) but regardless it makes Elijah laugh.

He pulls away from his brother and stares at him, dead on. The tears have finally stopped, by some small miracle, and Elijah wants to leave before any more decide now is a good time for it, and yet Klaus is unusually open and unguarded in this moment and he wishes he could see this caring side of his brother more often.

“Thank you Klaus,” he responds earnestly, trying to get up off the bed and still being restrained by Klaus’ werewolf strength. He doesn’t respond to their promise of family. It’s a little too soon.

“Also, you have to stay here for tonight. Your bed is-“ Klaus looks a little shifty, as though scared of setting him off again somehow “-bloody,” he settles on that word and Elijah recalls that fact with a twinge of embarrassment.

“It looks like it…brother,” he smiles tentatively at Klaus, who doesn’t bother returning it before he lies down onto the dark sheets and almost grumpily throws a pillow at Elijah, who smiles softly (vulnerable in a way he hated to be and yet this was still repayment for the favour Klaus had done him) and lies down onto it.

Elijah pulls the duvet up over them for a mimicry of warmth, and they lie there in silence, not acknowledging the other’s presence but still aware of it, somehow.

He smiles to himself at the thought of the trust that Klaus had in him, and whispered almost silently into the night air.

“Forever and always, dear brother,”

________________________________________

It’s such a cute scene the next day that even Rebekah doesn’t have the heart to wake them. Haylee suggests photographic evidence, and a lot of it, but they both awkwardly notice the blood and tear stains littered around the clothing (not to mention on Elijah’s face) and they think that maybe, this is something he wouldn’t want a picture of.

After all, they all know how much power a memory can hold.


End file.
